'The gh'

My name is Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird, and Fionnghuala is spelled F-I-O-N-N-G-H-U-A-L-A.  It is the oldest form of the name and the one that indicates the meaning of the name, with the removal of the ‘gh’ removing its meaning.  Fionnghuala means blonde hair on shoulders, ‘Fionn’ meaning blonde, ‘ghuala’ meaning shoulders, with the h silencing the g in the middle of the name, and I was so named because I was born with bright blonde hair.  While I’ve still got the blonde hair I hacked off the length of it thus reflecting the queer part of my multifaceted identity.

I went to Bunscoil Phobal Feirste for primary school and there were three Fionnghualas in my year, but I was the only ‘gh’.  And then I was the only Fionnghuala from primary school to go to Coláiste Feirste, the Irish medium secondary school here in Belfast.  There were three Fionnghualas in my year there – all with the ‘gh’.  So I grew up with a sense of normalcy around my name, however I always knew that my language was perceived as being contentious and I internalised this.

Even though I loved speaking Irish with my daddy and I loved my mummy for trying, when we were outside the house or school or the Cultúrlann, I was mortified when my daddy spoke in Irish to me.  This is known as culture cringe, where colonised people cannot shake off the colonial ideals and feel a sense of shame surrounding their own language and culture.

This is the reality of living as colonised peoples even when you know your own mother tongue, because colonialism is insidious and pervasive and indeed persistent.  But it’s also obtrusive, in the form of ‘curry my yoghurts’ and the racism and coloniality of British imperialism should not be missed in that statement by the way, and it’s also in the form of cuts to Irish language services and deliberately misspelling street signs. But what I didn’t realise at 18 was how much this attitude prevailed outside of the six counties.

After my A-levels I went to NUI Galway to study engineering as I was told I could complete my degree in Gaeilge, my language of instruction within academia up until now.  This was not the case.  And, go tobann, or suddenly, for the first time in my life I was the only Fionnghuala, with or without a ‘gh’ in my year.

Agus níos measa arís, even worse, there was a low-level hostility toward the language and a bit of snobbery from Gaeilgeoirí or Irish speakers there towards Gaeilgeoirí from the north.  But it wasn’t all bad. I had always been politicised and in Galway I found groups of people who thought like me on issues surrounding a woman’s right to choose and Palestine solidarity where we successfully campaigned for the SU to endorse the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement.

I also found a group of people who linked language shift in Ireland to colonialism and to neo-liberalism.  But down there I also encountered, a group of right-wing religious fundamentalists, known infamously as the Burke Family from Mayo, or the Westport Baptist Church as we called them.  One day, they had an anti-marriage equality stall on campus next to our Irish language stall, and someone who I may or may not have been an associate of, flipped their stall and ripped up their materials.  Cue, the Burke’s going absolutely fuckin bananas and calling the Guards.

The Guards, dealing with the Burkes who at this stage had reached a level of hysteria that involved them hugging a notice board with their poster on it and blocking people from ‘corrupting the crime scene’, were forced into taking our details to appease the Burke’s claims of ‘thuggery’.  So, the guard asks for my details, which I provide, and he says ‘Nic Roibeaird, what’s that in English?’ to which, I, from Béal Feirste, who grew up in a politicised environment, who understood that we speak English due to colonialism, who was actively decolonising my own mind, told him that I don’t use my ‘slave name’, a term to which we will return with a bit more nuance.  And he looked at me and at my address, and said ‘So you’re from Belfast?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and there’s a gh in Fionnghuala.’

So, obviously engineering was not for me and I returned to Belfast and eventually went to Queen’s to study History and Sociology.  And once again, the ‘gh’ and the rest of my name seemed to be causing problems.  In my first year we had to hand in both hard and electronic copies of our essays, and when I went to hand in my essay I was asked for my name in English, to which I answered that I don’t have an English name, I was then told that the receptionist had never seen Fionnghuala spelled that way… with the ‘gh.’  I then posted about this encounter on Facebook saying that I spared her ‘the slave name’ rant.

This was cynically represented by certain elements of the left as me peddling the white slave myth, which for those who don’t know is an ahistorical attempt to claim that the Irish were subject to the chattel slavery as those who were kidnapped from the shores of Africa once were.  This myth was created for Irish-Americans to try to downplay the racism felt by people of colour – which is the exact opposite of what I was trying to do when attempting to shine light on internal colonisation within Ireland.

While this was a deliberate misrepresentation to delegitimise persistent micro-aggressions and quite often bigotry that I had experienced as a Gaeilgeoir, it was a good opportunity to revisit the term ‘slave name’ bearing in mind the emergence of the discourse surrounding the white slave myth which did not exist when I originally used the term.  So, I now refer to an English translation of my name not as a slave name, but as a colonised name.

While Gaeilge is all around us, so too is colonialism, particularly in places which claim to be progressive.  Because of our complicated past and our ongoing sectarian divide, there exists a tendency to try to brush over the harsh reality and legacy of colonialism so as not to alienate those from the Protestant community.  While this is well-meaning, ignoring colonialism doesn’t make it go away.  All it does is protect this ‘abnormal normality’ as the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls it.

It makes us feel that it’s normal that we speak a language that has no relationship to the land that we stand on, that doesn’t inform our relationship to our environment or to others, and that is not our mother tongue.  Instead, we have a language and a culture that was forced upon us through violent colonial conquest, and whose supremacy leaves no room for plurilingualism.  It is a reality that has dehumanised us all.

Colonialism has, in the words of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, set off a ‘cultural bomb’ the effect of which ‘is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.’  So what my name, and the ‘gh’ represents, is an effort to decolonise and it makes people uncomfortable.

It makes me uncomfortable, do you know how hard it is to deal with Virgin Media and have to spell F-I-O-N-N-G-H-U-A-L-A N-I-C R-O-I-B-E-A-I-R-D out in the phonetic alphabet about 6 times as you get passed from person to person?  It would be so much easier to drop the ’gh’ and to use Roberts.

But my name is my identity, it represents my relationship to colonialism, and I hope it indicates to other oppressed people that I will stand by them in their struggles.  That’s why I don’t use Fionnuala Roberts, is mise Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird, with the ‘gh’.